The year was 1994, and D.E.
It didn’t work.
“You’re crazy,” Wastrom remembered thinking.
Not long after, a young Jeff Bezos started selling books online in Seattle.
“When I’m 80, am I going to regret leaving Wall Street?
Will I regret missing a chance to be there at the beginning of the internet?
Yes,” Bezos recalled asking himself, according to a 1999 profile in Wired.
This is not an exhaustive list.
It was acquired in 2019.
Others are just getting started.
Here are eight quantrepreneurs who left Wall Street to chase unicorns and build the next great tech company.
But Danny Jachowski had his reasons.
“You go in every day and you’re solving the same problem.
“It just became a little stale.”
Initially, he’d found the work energizing.
He quit his master’s degree program a few courses shy of graduating to join Jump.
“That’s what took me into trading.
There’s an opportunity to measure your success in a real way,” he said.
As a robotics enthusiast, autonomous driving intrigued him.
But the stakes were high an error could mean blood on your hands.
Then he connected with a nameless startup that would eventually be called BlueNote AI.
But insurance companies are heavily regulated and don’t have as much incentive to rock the boat with innovation.
They needed an AI wiz, and the opportunity resonated with Jachowski.
As it turned out, the company name was short-lived.
As with Jump, Jachowski has taken on several roles with Acrisure since the buyout.
It’s a well-worn career path, so the poll result wasn’t particularly surprising.
The percentage favoring finance and consulting plummeted.
“People wanted to go into more aspirational things like healthcare or nonprofit,” Sim recalled.
He was quickly blown away by the culture and caliber of his colleagues.
“Everyone there was absolutely exceptional,” Sim said.
“They’ve done a great job of collecting brilliant folks from all parts of the world.”
But after four years of crunching data to develop trading strategies, Sim started to get restless.
He’d also cofounded a medical-machine startup that worked on a drug-delivery patch.
He decided to join ApolloMed, initially as a project manager on a $58,300-a-year salary.
The contrasts between his old gig and the creaky medical company were immediately apparent.
At ApolloMed it was just the opposite: There was alpha laying around everywhere he looked.
“I really gorged, having starved on morsels of alpha for years.”
“We found people who came to classes had lower blood-sugar levels,” Sim said.
ApolloMed eases that pain.
It’s a bit like Shopify for independent doctors, Sim says.
“For the most part, our doctors make more money than they did before,” Sim said.
ApolloMed has benefited as well the company’s revenues and stock price have soared since he joined.
Chase Lochmiller, Crusoe Energy
Startup ideas can form in unorthodox places.
For Chase Lochmiller, that place was Mount Everest.
It was the first time in his career he had nothing planned no next job or academic pursuit.
Cryptocurrency mining is notoriously energy-intensive.
What if they could bring the digital-mining rigs to the oil fields and repurpose that wasted energy?
That dream faded as he discovered the glacial pace of academic research.
“In the quant space, you’re making markets more efficient by being this profit-taking mercenary, essentially.
But it’s a fun problem from an academic perspective.
In the summer of 2017, he took the plunge and left Jump to join Polychain Capital.
At the time, it was a small cryptocurrency-investment fund with roughly $25 million in assets.
He recalled the experience as “surreal.”
He didn’t stay long.
Brand-name backers including Bain Capital, the Founders Fund, and Valor Equity invested.
In April, Crusoe raised another $350 million in funding at a valuation of $1.75 billion.
There’s good reason for that.
“I grew up under a regime where entrepreneurship didn’t exist overtly,” he said.
“It’s very isolating.
You feel like you’re writing something very few people read ultimately,” he said.
While at PDT, Dancanet made an angel investment in Theorem.
He wasn’t previously familiar with the marketplace-lending arena.
“This was a way of taking tens of thousands of bets,” Dancanet said.
Dancanet and Evulet were convinced only a new propulsion system could truly push the industry forward.
“And that’s really appealing to me.”
“I missed that after some time,” Dancanet said.
He’d dabbled in bitcoin mining starting in 2011, while he was a programmer at D.E.
Shaw Research, the biomedical research arm of the famed quant hedge fund.
Ditching the lucrative world of systematic trading was a gamble.
“I was like, ‘I’ll be on noncompete anyways, so who cares?'”
But that didn’t happen.
In mid-2018, he met Rei Chiang through some mutual quant-trading friends.
The pair joined forces.
“People are putting real money in this.
We should just go raise money and actually make a run for it,” Chitra remembered thinking.
They rebuffed the offer from Facebook, and instead the duo tried to ramp up as quickly as possible.
They raised a seed round from First Round Capital.
They also intentionally exploited the noncompete dynamic at Wall Street quant firms to bootstrap Gauntlet.
“Our first few hires were actually just people on noncompetes.
“It was a great way to bootstrap a startup.”
“They’re so unwilling to do something with a tiny amount of risk,” Chitra said.
“Life is a little too short to be always focused on that.”
The firm’s business also benefited from the addition of some senior quant-trading firepower.
Morillo wasn’t an obvious or inevitable candidate for a career switch to Silicon Valley.
Moreover, he was happy at Citadel and had strong relationships at the firm.
But the Opendoor opportunity was different.
It offered a unique chance to apply his expertise in algorithmic trading to an antiquated and fragmented market.
Market making in homebuying is done at a high level, not dissimilar to quantitative trading, Morillo explained.
“The high-level economic questions are very similar; the specifics are very different,” Morillo said.
He also found the tangible, real-world impact his work could have alluding.
Trading provides quick and concrete feedback, but it can feel abstract.
“It isn’t just some abstract problem, right?
“That piece of it has been incredibly rewarding to me,” Morillo said.
On the one hand, for those departing Renaissance Technologies, the options in finance are severely limited.
“I was there a long time.
I’ve seen it all,” Penavic said.
“The golden parachute is quite golden, so why not take advantage of it?”
A restaurant is set to open soon.
“We measure the eye, the exact shape.
We figure out why there isn’t perfect vision.
“It’s a lot of data, it’s very fast data,” Penavic said.
“That’s what I did for a quarter of a century a lot of fast data.”
The technology itself isn’t brand new.
It has existed for decades to treat a bulging eye disorder called keratoconus.
TECLens’ insight was miniaturizing the tech, collecting data, and automating the process.
The company eventually plans to sell the machines, called the CXLens, and single-use lenses to medical practices.
When might you see the CXLens at the doctor’s office?
